itself...a social protozooa, so to speak" with a contemporary interpretation which discovers instead "a design...for a physically labile society"
(Gumbert, M. 1984:63). Peterson, in an exhaustive analysis of land-use and land-rights^ points out that Radcliffe-Brown was wrong in assuming a
congruity between the ideology of ownership and the practice of economic activity (Peterson, N.
1986:24) and in failing to recognize the
variability of the descent model from one region to another (Peterson, N. 1986:70).
There are three considerations that dilute the purity of the concept of a patri-clan estate as unitary and bounded. The first is the question of boundaries, whether they are fixed over time and readily identifiable in space. The second is the existence of areas within estate boundaries that do not belong to the estate- enclave areas. The third is that variability in the size of estates, even within a single ecological and cultural region, produces the possibility of fission, fusion, and extinction of estates over time (Peterson, N. 1986:55-9 ) .
In general it is true that most of north and central Australia was divided into territories inherited patrilineally. It appears that in the resource-rich areas of the northern regions estates were smaller, boundaries more easily identified, and some degree of control over access to economic resources practised. In one such area of the
KimberleVj Blundell has re-constructed the location of a number of patri-estates from the memories of a re-located group in a settlement at Derby
(Blundell, V. 1980). These are said to have precisely delineated boundaries although the
dividing line would shift over time (Blundell, V. and Layton, R. 1978:239). However, the boundaries of patri-estates were not always so rigidly
defined. Among their neighbours, the coastal Bardi, each patri-clan territory, or buru, centres on a particular site which gives its name to the group and each individual within it "The ownership of the sites themselves is reasonably clear, but the Bardi do not specify (or express concern about) precise boundaries between buru or the extent of a group’s territory towards the interior of the peninsula"
(Robinson, M.V. 1980:187). In most of the inland and coastal areas today the location and extent of estates is still common knowledge among the older people who had use of the land during the colonial period on missions and pastoral stations. It is relatively easy to elicit information about the extent of patri-clan territory among the inland people, but extremely difficult among people with a desert culture on the southern borders of the
Kimberley. Estates among desert people assume the character of a number of related sites either clustered in a single locality or linked by a common mythology. Territorial boundaries
encompassing these are attenuated or non-existent (see Peterson, N. 1986:55). Extreme variability in the size of estates, even within a single
ecological and cultural region, leads to the supposition that small enclave areas can become estates over time (Peterson, N. 1986:59), and non contiguous areas of land comprising the same estate may split into a number of autonomous patrician territories by the transformation of sub-lineages into independent descent groups.
The ultimate right to make economic decisions concerning the exploitation of a clan estate was
transmitted patrilineaiiy (Peterson, N. 1986:63). Nevertheless rights in estates or parts of them are expressed through rights in the ritual property associated with them (Peterson, N. 1986:59). There are a number of claims to territory apart from patrilineal inheritance that are frequently advanced, among them are conception, birth,
initiation, and burial.5 Most of these are related to the acquisition of ritual knowledge or mythic affiliation. For instance, birth in a particular locality indicates a latent ritual relationship associated with particular myths which is
actuaiised by the acquisition of appropriate knowledge. In most of the Kimberley, as in the Western Desert, ritual knowledge is also acquired in dreams (Tonkinson, R. 1978:102) and these
usually occur in a particular locality of
residence, not necessarily a person’s clan estate. In some such revealed ceremonies, for instance the
Ngalwirriwirri in the East Kimberley,6 the dream
seems designed to impart ritual knowledge about country to immigrants who would not otherwise have access to it. While the strongest form of authority a person may exercise arises from the coincidence of their patrician mythology and ritual with that of their conception, the mythology associated with a person^ conception links them "unequivocally" with that particular ritual cycle (Kolig, E.
1981:34), and in areas where the link between
tracts of land and particular ritual has not become attenuated, confers rights in that clan estate.
5 Peterson lists descent, residence, kinship and/or ceremonial links, and identifies under 'residence’ ritual interests derived from conception, birth, initiation, or burial (Peterson, 1986:59-60). Added to this must be the mechanism of dreams which reveal knowledge about sites and localities, therefore conferring rights, and permit visits to areas too remote for corporeal access (Tonkinson, R. 1978:102,113. Tonkinson, R. 1970). 6 Witnessed in Kununurra in 1986.
The attempt to find an obvious, simple,
hierarchical structure reflected in material
conditions is increasingly rejected in contemporary analysis in favour of the alternative view of a network of underlying practices;elaborate and versatile and capable of generating a range of behaviour within much broader limits. A key factor was the establishment of alliances through
marriage.
Marriage and Gender A l l iances
Much writing on women in Aboriginal society refers not to their capacity to mediate land-use and ritual responsibilities but to
considerations such as rights, autonomy and status. Practice varied considerably from region to region and the data are open to a number of interpretations which respond as much to conflict in European gender relations as to the Aboriginal case. The Kimberley is one area where there is good information from an early period provided by a
researcher with a primary interest in the question of women’s status in Aboriginal society (Kaberry, P. 1939). In recent years considerable reaction has taken place against androcentric studies,
especially the influence of early ethnographic work, that described Aboriginal women as little more than chattels lacking control in both the ritual and economic spheres. Even the view expressed by White that Aboriginal women were, and saw themselves to be, ’junior partners’ of the men in society (White, I.M. 1978:46)
received criticism (Berndt, C.H. 1983:19-20) and
the view that women were ’equal but
separate’, regulating their own subsistence, controlling reproduction, and owning their own secret ceremonies.(Bell, D. 1983:229-250) has been highly influential. Recently balance has been introduced into the debate by soundly-based
revisionist critiques (Hamilton, A. 1986). This question of status will not, however, be expanded upon here; it is peripheral to the description of women’s structural position regulating the
practical outcome of the ideologies of kinship and territoriality.
Patrilineal clans throughout the Kimberley were exogamous, but marriage could be virilocal or uxorilocal, residence varying over the period of the marriage. Polygyny was common. Love records in 1917 at Port George IV most of the old men had two or more wives and one old man had seven (Love, J.R.B. 1936:31), though by 1935 only 12.6 per cent of Gidja men and 7.4 per cent of Djaru men
surveyed by Kaberry had more than one wife (Kaberry, P. 1939:137). This accords with
Peterson’s observation that polygyny is not so common in desert areas (Peterson, N. 1986:152). Among the Gidja.a woman would go to live with her husband when she was between 9 and 12 years
old (in one case reported by Kaberry as young as 6 ), but her parents would camp nearby and she would return to them from time to time (Kaberry, P. 1939:94, Blundell, V. and Layton, R. 1978:238). According to Kaberry’s informants^ she would not have sexual relations with her husband until after puberty (Kaberry, P. 1939:94). The
partnership between the man and woman, sealed by gifts from the prospective husband and his
hunt and forage on another’s territory. Kaberry adheres to the idea that residence was normatively virilocai, yet concedes that a man frequently would live and hunt in the territory of "his mother, his mother’s mother, his father’s mother, his daughter’s husband, his brother’s wife, [as well as] his own wife." (Kaberry, P. 1939:137) Peterson suggests from his own work in ArnhemLand, and considerable supporting evidence elsewhere, that the pivotal relationship in a band - the one regulating the variation between patrician members and the band using the
patrician’s territory - " is that between a married couple and the wife’s parents." He
suggests a pattern of development in which a man initially lives in his wife’s father’s band contributing to the support of her parents. As the wife’s parents grow old and die, or the couple’s own family grows, they return to the man’s patrilocal band. Here, as he ages, a man attempts to marry a younger wife and draw her family to him (Peterson, N. 1978:23-24).
The effect of gender-based alliances is clearly to draw members of one patrilineal descent group to join hunting and foraging bands in the territory of another. Women also would expect to have multiple partners during the course of their lifetime. Assuming that Roses’ analysis of Groote Eylandt marriages in 1941 is applicable to the Kimberley, a typical sequence in the life of a woman was that a girl would go to live with her first husband about the age of 9 years; in her
maturity she would twice change husbands due either to their death or her elopement or abduction, finishing her life with a fourth partner in her early fifties (Rose, F. 1987:108-9). While a man
could expect to live with most of his wives at the same time (apart from those eloped,
abducted, or deceased), a woman would expect to live with only one of her husbands at a time. She would therefore transform the rights for her kin to use territory over time, while a man would by alliances through his wives have the rights to
several at once.7
Understanding the effect of multiple partnerships links the abstract system of kinship rights and obligations to the observation of actual land use. The complementary aspect of a man’s acquisition of wives is the other party’s bestowal of a
daughter. Regulation of hunting and foraging rights, as well as the balance of productive members of a band, lies not only in the success of the strategising aging male but also in the negotiations of the female’s kin. Even in cases of abduction or elopement, arrangements for its success and regulation of its consequences allowed for manipulation of the outcome by the
family group.
It has not yet been duly emphasised that strict conventions governed the eligibility of marriage partners. These varied considerably even within the Kimberley region, and stimulated early
7 Blundell and Layton state that among the Horora and Ngarinvin marriage